


From The Ashes

by Potboy



Series: From the Ashes [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Gingerpilot, Pre-Slash, Ritualistic Cannibalism, first order funerary customs, or pre-gingerpilot to be more exact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:48:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22283647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: It's a Hux lives story. We all know he was wearing body armour all along :)In which Hux travels to Exegol after the battle to find what's left of the Finalizer. There's nothing left for him to live for. But little does he know, there is someone in the galaxy who cares that they owe him their life.Serious Hux introspection and a massive digression into First Order ritual and funerary customs, for those who like that kind of thing.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Series: From the Ashes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782016
Comments: 56
Kudos: 150





	From The Ashes

After the shaking cacophony of atmospheric entry, the escape pod's anti-grav generators kick on with a crescendo of whirring, peaking in a shriek as the capsule hits the ground. Even with full power, the generators cannot completely compensate for the meteorite-like forces of the pod hitting the ground, but the remaining jolt is absorbed by the thick anti-inertia gel that fills it like the meat inside an egg.

Like an egg, the capsule cracks open on impact, viscous fluid draining out, being sucked dry by the bluish-grey soil beneath.

Hux removes his breathing mask with a shaky hand, and worms his way out of the crack, sighing as the goo immediately begins to evaporate and smoke away from his skin and clothes. He had applied bacta and a splint to his leg on the long journey from the _Steadfast_ , and his chest feels bruised but otherwise undamaged beneath the body armour, so he should not feel as injured as he does. He shouldn't feel as though his sinews have been cut, as though some intangible thing—like a soul—has been mortally wounded in him.

Why is he still alive? Why has he bothered to be still alive?

The land he steps out onto is apocalyptic. Its sky is starless, but constantly split with strobing lightning, driving the steel spike of his ever-present migraine deeper into his skull. Sometimes lit with merciless brilliance, sometimes only glimpsed by the pools of burning fuel, dead Star Destroyers cover the plain like mountains.

There's no way of filling a whole Destroyer with impact-absorbing gel. They are designed to keep their crew safe in the vacuum, not to fall disastrously out of the sky.

Everyone aboard those ships will be dead.

He closes his mouth, presses his fists to the bruise in his chest. Something is trying to get out of him—some emotion or other—and if he lets it escape it's going to take his lungs with it. There's a high pitched whine building at the back of his throat. Unseemly. Weak.

The spike of his headache is joined by one in his jaw as he grinds his teeth down hard on the sob. These are not his people anyway. He doesn't care about these new, shiny, 'Final Order' bastards, waiting here in safety while his Order did all their dirty work. While  Hux's generation wandered and starved, and grew and sacrificed,  while they fought and died. W hile they put all their love and life's blood into the goal of  getting the galaxy ready for—

_It was meant to be for peace_ , he thought bitterly.  _It was meant to be for integrity, equality, prosperity for all._

All a _pfasking_ lie.

He doesn't know what he's doing here—what he's doing anywhere—but the transponder in his datapad indicates that one of those fallen behemoths is his _Finalizer,_ and in the absence of rational thought something in the hindbrain says _go home_.

If Exegol has a sun, it is above such clouds that it never sees the surface. As he scrambles amongst the debris, he thinks of Starkiller Base, engineered to be functional without losing any of the native ecosystem. Designed to be efficient and elegant, deadly and beautiful in equal measure, a pleasant place to work during the long, long years when it was never to be fired again. Here, there is an equal grandeur, but it's all decay and impossibilities, piled on one another, statue after statue in ruinous arrogance and age.

He is glad to reach _Finalizer_ 's airlock and hurry inside before he has to look too hard at her broken back, at the proud, sleek lines half-buried in dust.

Inside, he props himself up on the nearest wall and breathes, breathes, through unbecoming panic, only raising his head when the nape of his neck stirs. It's so quiet.

Normally the engines throb through the great superstructure like a heart. Now there is only a distant drip of liquid and a silence so profound he can hear his own blood in his ears. This place is more haunted than the ruins outside.

The thing inside his chest makes another valiant effort to escape. He stifles it again, striding toward medbay, where he picks up rations and another bacta pad for his leg. A small warmth returns to him, like a single active running light, on seeing that—well trained—the infirmary staff have racked the medi-droids in their padded battle positions, and set all the equipment in its impact-proof containers.

The staff themselves are smeared about the walls. Most of the intact parts have puddled in a stinking slick around the base of a shattered bacta tank. CMO Ryzk's face glares at him, cloudy-eyed, from among a nest of entrails, and he pinches his nose and mouth closed for a moment before reaching out to activate the droids.

They come hovering out of storage, surrounding him with their bulbous black bodies and dangling arms. They always remind him of DeeDee—that awful snitch who used to run back to his father the moment it looked like he wasn't bearing his chastisement stoically enough—and under their judgemental red sensors it is easier to hold himself together.

Emergency power seems to be working acceptably. The reddened rooms are dimly but steadily lit, and the medical terminal accepts one of his many deeply hidden override codes. From there he can see the full extent of the devastation. It's only a list of data at first. He forces it to remain only a list of data for as long as he can.

The engines are sheared from the main body of the craft entirely. Water reclamation is flooding the whole of technical level BWA6, but five of the seven composting tanks are intact. It will be enough, if they're packed in tight.

Hux sets MD201 to find a working transport and the others to search the rest of the medical floor for casualties. The droids lop off the right hand little finger of each corpse, for identification and memorial and bring them to him before taking the rest of the remains to be packed into the composting tanks. Soon, he has a pile of digits, a foot wide, a foot deep, and this is only the first floor.

He picks up the first finger. It's cold, wet. The skin is brown, with an ashen undertone, and the nail has been painted with a subtle, non-regulation, pearly tint. This is the finger of Lieutenant Ata Olien, who he remembers used to spend all her free time in the infirmary, because she had a crush on one of the nurses.

She was seventeen, and he had chosen her for his ship because she was bright, and vicious, intelligent, idealistic—dedicated to a shared future that he had promised her was going to be glorious.

A lie. He had believed the lie fervently because that was how they made him, and in return that was how he made her.

Fury breaks through his shock, briefly. Dear chthonic gods of the oceans, how the Imperials must have gloated among themselves when they were alone. Hux and all the generations after him had been like children believing in fairy tales; they had been naive, gullible fools, while the adults nudged and winked and laughed behind their backs.

How had he really thought that men like Brookes, like Pryde, like his father, had wanted to create something better than the sink of miserable corruption in which they had so proudly wallowed? How had he ever thought that bullies like them would want to create a future in which any sane person would wish to live?

Oh yes. Conditioning. Of course. Every time he thinks he's shaken it off there's another layer underneath.

He is thankful his generation and the younger children are dead. He closes his eyes to relieve a strange, burning sting. Yes, that's the word. He's _thankful_ Lt. Olien is dead, and he doesn't have to look her in the face. To tell her _we were only the advanced guard of a pickled madman, designed as the disposable shield around his real forces. We were only ever supposed to_ _restore_ _the system that hurt and despised us our whole life long._

Swallowing nausea, he presses her fingerprint to the screen, bringing up her record. He ticks 'deceased.'

A voice moans in the corridor. He drops the remnant, whirls around. But there's nothing. Wind through a tear in the skin, unnatural as a ghost. How huge a Star Destroyer feels when he is the only one alive on board.

Turning back to his task, he uses his knife to separate the distal phalange from the rest of the finger. He peels off the flesh and that polished nail, until he has the tiny bone isolated and cleaned. Setting it, all festive white and red, into a silver infirmary dish, makes the start of the memorial pile.

It is hard to say, now, where this custom had begun. Maybe out of those early days of starvation and cannibalism, when “we bear our dead in our bodies,” had been the only way they could get past the horror of it. Or maybe it was some Stormtrooper ritual the Order's young people had adopted, because they had been allowed nothing else. The practice of keeping just one bone, so they would always have those they'd lost near. Stormtroopers with necklaces of their squadmates' fingerbones beneath their armour. Subadults with the dust of their classmates, rivals and friends, tattooed under their skin…

The old Imperials had sneered. Called them animals. Savages. Had tried to stamp it out. They'd been a little afraid too, of what they'd created.

It was as good a reason as any to carry the practice on.

He works methodically through the pile. The emotion imprisoned in his chest grows steadily until it squeezes out of the limits of his body and begins to darken the air, thickening it. Breathing becomes a struggle.

When this level is processed, he chokes in a breath, brings up his own record. With commendable efficiency, Pryde has already marked him as an executed traitor. Officially, he no longer exists.

He belongs here then, with the dead. It is something of a relief.

Level BWA7a is navigable by foot, so he takes the bowl of bones down there, into the dirty and secret levels of the ship where top brass are not welcome. There is a row of waste incinerators, quiescent black cubes, filthy with their own detritus. Ash has been flung all over the floor. His boots crunch in it as he walks over to the furthest furnace.

He's not supposed to know that the hatch at the rear of this lesser used machine is considered holy, nor to know that some of the ration packs, expended blaster cartridges and strangely shaped rocks now littering the floor were left here as offerings.

There is one ash pan that has been polished to a sheen of silver. The Finalizer's serial number has been scratched into it over and over by many different hands. He unsheaths his dagger and adds his own crabbed mark to the others, and when he manages to get the machine to light, he pours the bones into this sacred receptacle and pushes them together into the flame.

Crying is weak, and he will not be weak. He watches in silence until the cycle is done, then turns away to begin another level.

Later, when the monstrous thing he carries in his chest becomes too heavy to bear, he tries to return to his own rooms. His feet stop inexplicably just beneath the threshold, and he can't force himself to go inside. It's weak. Weak. Boiling with shame and fury, he takes another step, only for his stomach to turn and his legs to give way beneath him. He has to retreat to stop himself from wasting food by vomiting his last meal all over the newly sanitized floor.

The room knew he was a traitor. He can feel its judgement, as he crawls away to collapse. No room along the officers' corridor will shelter him. They know he is as much a traitor as FN-2187. They know he is scum.

_I am not! I would never have turned my back on the First Order. Never. It was Ren. He sold us to the Empire. We were already eaten, consumed by that fucking old corpse on a stick before I—_

He sleeps where he falls, after that. Washes and shaves in Medical's decontamination facilities, feeling himself like an infection in the body of the ship. He doesn't belong here any more, but nor does he belong anywhere else.

It takes him weeks to work through the whole ship, hand-peeling tiny bones from colleagues who are becoming more disgusting to the touch by the day. The thing that he is not looking at dogs his every step and makes each breath a throat full of knives.

When the last bowl of bones is in his hands, he presses his knife blade to his own little finger and watches the blood run. The pain is very far away, and yet it fills his mouth with ice and panic nevertheless. Can he bury himself here with his crew? Should he?

But no. He's nothing now. Nothing. There's nothing left of the dream, of his purpose. Nothing of him ever was his own. The _Finalizer_ wouldn't want him now any more than anyone else had.

“Ah!” Hand spasming, fingers burning, he tips the final bowl into the incinerator. The flames sear his eyes and turn into water—no, that's the tears. He can't keep them back any more. Doubling over, covering his face with his hands, he bows down, falls down, collapsing into the ash and dirt like one of the scattered shells—empty, meaningless. Just a great, cosmic joke, played by Brendol on the register of one out of a million unwanted, disposable brats. None of it had ever meant anything at all.

He weeps, and screams with rage, and weeps again. Once he's started there's so much to cry about. There's _years_ of it.

Eventually however he's wrung dry. He physically cannot cry any more. Now his chest feels bruised again, but from the inside. His face is wet and gritty with ash and he swipes it clean with a shaking hand.

_None of it had ever meant anything at all._

Shuffling around in the dirt, he rests his back against the warm metal of the incinerator and drowses, imagining clouds. They are pearly-grey and though they're always raining, the water is silver as it descends, warm too. Time to sleep, perhaps. After all that striving, it's time to let go. Time to starve to death as he should have done so many years ago.

Time passes.

Out of the pale clouds the thought falls on him that it is not yet too late to make whatever he pleases out of himself.

Is it?

Are people… _allowed_ … to just go around assigning their own meaning to themselves?

Is _he_?

The wind has never stopped mournfully fluting through the holes in the hull. Nor has the distant clatter of droids clearing the rubble, mopping the floors ceased. One day it will—shortly after the fuel tanks are drained and the recharging stations go offline, when silence falls again. But Hux will be bones himself by then and the noises no longer alarm him. That's why he misses the footsteps for so long.

“Rey said you'd be here.”

He opens an eye slowly to see the casually dishevelled form of Poe Dameron, General of the Resistance. Dameron's looking better than the last time Hux saw him, like he's had a few days of good sleep. Moisturized. His skin has a healthy glow and his hair is the kind of mass of irrepressible curls that would have got his head shaved in Brendol's regime.

Hux's mind empties of silver rain and the whole galaxy comes rushing back. “Is he dead?” he croaks, trying to moisten his mouth and throat enough to speak. It's been a while since he drank.

Poe laughs. “It figures that's what you'd ask. Yes. Kylo Ren is dead.”

It's not the triumph that he hoped, but maybe only because he doesn't have the energy for spite right now. A month ago he would have said that Kylo Ren had taken everything he loved away from him, but by now it's clear that those things had been illusions all along.

“Good,” he says nevertheless, resentment throbbing like an old bruise through his ribs.

“Looks like you're not doing too great yourself, Hugs.”

That stupid name! But it was not as though his real one was any better. “What are you doing here, Dameron?”

Poe unbuttoned one of the many pods on his bandolier, unscrewed the cap from a little bottle and passed it over. Liquid gleamed as Hux took it, like inspiration.

Probably poison. He drank it anyway, trying to parse the meanings behind Poe's oddly indulgent smile.

“I figured you were owed a rescue.”

“You're too late then. I'm dead,” he says, waving a hand at the panel in the wall that still shows the scrolling tally of the names of the slain. “They shot me. It's official.”

The idea that anyone would ever come back for him, that they would go out of their way to rescue him? It's preposterous. It can't be true. Worse, it makes the tears want to start again, and he'll be damned if he starts blubbing in front of…

Not exactly an enemy, but close enough.

“Well that's good.” Poe leans against the incinerator beside him, looking with interest at the heaped pan of ashes. It's no longer silver—Hux hasn't had time to clean it once more after the final firing—but the scratched on names shine out brighter on the dark background. “What's this?”

Hux pulls himself shakily to his feet, feeling protective, proprietorial—those two things are the same. “The rest of my crew,” he says. “Your people killed them all. Congratulations.”

Paling, Poe steps back, but there's a new look in his eye, almost as though Hux has received unexpectedly high marks in a test of some sort. “You buried them?”

“In our way,” Hux agrees, but the thought rebukes him. _We carry the dead in our bodies so that in us they live on, so that our victories become their own._ If he is over then all the Finalizer's ghosts are gone with him, and it truly was all for nothing.

“See, that makes me so happy,” says Poe, nonsensically. Hux gives him a look that he hopes expresses incredulity, but Poe's words feel like praise. They lift—by nanometers—the weight that's been crushing him this past year. “I owe you a life for a life, and if Armitage Hux is dead, then I don't have to wrestle with myself over taking you back for a trial. I can let whoever you are go free...”

' _Whoever you are_ ,' Hux thinks, rain once more on his mind, washing old things away, unclogging drains and gutters—he has a brief flash of the smell of wet grass and a torrent of water gently splashing over his bruised face, cooling and cleaning his split lip.

If Armitage Hux is dead, then he can be someone else.

Waters and stars, it's a strange thought. It sets his heart racing in a way that… has he ever felt like this before? He doesn't know what it means.

Dameron is still talking, waving his hands as if he's arguing with several people at once. “See, you killed all those people in Hosnia, but you kind of saved the galaxy too, and you got executed for that. So I figure that kind of breaks even. But on the other hand, I'm the General now and I've got to act like it, so I've got to consider whether I'd be letting a psychopath go free...”

His tirade falters, and he looks Hux in the eye. He seems more sober than he was a year ago. Thoughtful. He's grown up, evidently, and it's a good look on him.

“Which is why I'm glad to find you doing something decent,” he finishes quietly. “Taking care of what you love. Rose says that's what it's all for, when you get down to it.”

“None of what I love exists any more,” Hux says, and the grief presses its terrible weight on him once more.

Poe gives a rueful laugh. “Well, that's war for you,” he observes, not unsympathetically. “But what do you say? If I let you go, are you going to try to conquer the universe all over again? If I gave you a second chance, what would you do with it?”

Hux breathes in deep. Burned hydrocarbons, some kind of leather treatment on Poe's jacket, and aftershave in notes of amber and life-tree. Poe is relaxed now. His arms are crossed across his chest, right hand beneath the left. There's no way he could disentangle that pose and get his hand to his blaster before Hux could stab him through the eye with a monomolecular blade, probably taking the top of his head off with it. 'If I let you go' indeed.

But Hux is a new person now, and this is the most equitable interaction he's ever had. He's not prepared for it too to end with death.

“What do I want?” he ponders instead. The answer comes easily. “Integrity, equality, prosperity for all. I want to do my utmost to make it a better galaxy for the disregarded outcasts of the new republic.”

There's a reeling moment of vertigo when he thinks, _or is that only what I've been brainwashed to want?_

“Whoa,” Poe objects, almost concerned now. “That was not what I expected you to say. Well yes. Good. Good aims there, buddy, but we're going to have to have a long chat about your methods.”

If Hux rejects what he wants because it's what he's been programmed to want, then all that's left for the rest of his life is what he doesn't want. And frankly he's already had enough of that.

No, kriff it. Whether it's a smokescreen the Imps conditioned in him to conceal their real goals, or whether it's his own desire, it's definitely not what those hypocritical old bastards _actual_ _ly_ wanted from him.

Pfask them all. He will do good in the galaxy just to stick it to them. If they're looking up from some Sith hell, he will make their spirits _choke_ with it.

“Oh look,” Dameron laughed. “There's the manic gleam I know and love. That hopeless expression was beginning to freak me out. But I cannot lie, you're also a little scary when you get all focussed like that...”

The man loves the sound of his own voice, but Hux can hardly fault him for that.

“So, can I give you a lift to a new life?” Poe presses, dancing in place he's so eager to be gone. “New identity? You got a name in mind or will I have to give you one? I'm very good at—”

There's only one person in Hux's life who's ever given him something freely, not as a bargain but as a gift. Someone who saw that he was a terrified, outnumbered child and presented him with weapons. And the name sounds similar enough that he should answer to it readily in need.

Abandoning the name of Hux is a blasphemy for which he expects to be punished. He feels like a crab trying to break itself out of his own carapace, and yet it's a giddily exciting thing too, to be allowed not to be a Hux.

“Rax,” he manages, hoarse with the stress of it. “Tage Rax.”

Even in here the air is now whispering _traitor, betrayer, ungrateful._

_Ungrateful ill-born bastard, how dare you suggest you don't want the honour of my name? Who do you think you are, you—?_

“I'm Tage Rax.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Dameron grins, turns to go. There is nothing here that Rax wants. He will recoup his bank account later through back channels. Except…

He takes another drink, so that he can dampen his first two fingers in his mouth. Then he stirs the pile of ashes thoroughly and dips the digits in, coating them.

Dameron turns back just in time to watch him lick them clean.

“Oh what?” Poe grimaces. “I take it all back, you're disgusting, and our first stop is going to be getting you into some serious therapy, okay?”

“Whatever, Dameron.” He waves a lordly hand, feeling both transformed and more like himself than he has in years. His mouth is gritty and acrid, but the taste will fade, so he fills his cigarette case with more ashes, for tattoos later.

Nobody had really cared about any of them—the idealistic, zealous young people of the First Order, the little baby bodies that had gone into the trash—but he will carry them all. He owes them that. “Wherever I'm going now, scum, my dead are coming too.”


End file.
